Yeah, if I'm either throwing up or passing out because of the pain, I'll call it an 8-10. But the stupid thing is that I can get to that point from some really unexpected things--menstrual cramps being the oddest. Once, as an experiment, I didn't take painkillers for my period and recorded the pain on a ten-scale every hour; it peaked at nine, at which point I was not coherent enough to write down the score for that hour, because it would have involved remembering that I had intended to do it, somehow moving my fingers voluntarily, coordinating my eyes enough to figure out where the pencil was, how to pick it up, and how not to throw up or pass out when I moved to do so. The next hour it was down to 7 and I started recording again. (With medication, it tends to peak at 6, where it's smarter to lie down but still possible to stand if the house lights on fire or something.)
So how the heck do you judge pain like that? I mean--the physical damage was really minor, just the usual muscle cramps and bleeding, something my body could take care of without any medical help. But my subjective experience of it is of being too overwhelmed to really even comprehend what was going on around me.
On the other hand, I've shrugged off the usual assortment of bruises and cuts from self-injury. I've only gotten stitches once but some other cuts were deep enough that they should have had them at least for cosmetic reasons. When a nurse at the hospital where I got stitched up asked me whether the cuts hurt and I said "no", I was telling the truth. I suppose I could have felt them as painful if I had been paying attention; but I wasn't, really. They were irrelevant. I was unimpaired by pain (though quite impaired by depression at the time, thus the hospital visit). They marked me down as "delusional" for it, even though I was telling the truth. Often times I get bruises and cuts and I just don't notice, because it doesn't seem important. Technically, it hurts, but... it just doesn't feel bad. I know that sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but I'm honestly not. Things can hurt without feeling bad.
I have come to believe that the best indicator of the pain I'm supposed to be in is just looking at the injury and checking to see how much physical damage there is, or analyzing the symptoms of illness to see how much they slow me down. My subjective experience of pain is so wonky that I don't think it can give a doctor any information except whether or not to give me painkillers--and even then it would be stupid to take heavy duty painkillers for menstrual cramps; I'd just develop a tolerance and then they wouldn't work anymore.
Another indication of when I'm supposed to have been in a lot of pain is if, when the pain goes away, I feel "high". I often feel that way after menstrual cramps subside. Your body's natural painkillers come out to play at the point where pain or damage gets significant, and if the pain goes away and your endorphins are still going, you can feel like you're on morphine even though you're not.
Pain is weird, you know? The way I figure it, if it gets worse than what I've experienced, I'll probably just pass out; so it's likely I can deal with it well enough. The huge subjective component to it is really fascinating because the physical experience of it is real--one person can respond much more drastically to the same injury that hardly fazes someone else, with the physical damage being the same and the pain being much greater in one person than the other--and the physical indicators of pain being much stronger in one person than the other (you know, sweating, heart rate changes, muscle tension, all of that).
28 Mar 2013, 4:38 pm
] my shattered arm/elbow last summer scored an 8. i woulda thought that [before the accident happened to me] something like that would make me scream in agony.
